Once the nurses disembarked in Brisbane, Coate was assigned temporary duty at the 100th General Hospital.
With so many nurses standing one side of the ship, this caused a problem in that that side of the ship had too much weight on it, causing the captain to tell the nurses to go back to their cabins. Coate said when the nurses first spotted land for the first time in 17 days, they all rushed to see it. The nurses were at sea for 17 days before they disembarked at Brisbane, Australia on July 13. Because of this blackout, the nurses had to proceed to the ship by holding hands and walking in a single file to board and get to their cabins. In the middle of the night, the nurses were led to a river and put on a yacht, owned by movie star Robert Taylor, to take them to the ship that would transport them overseas.Īt that time there were no lights turned on because of a blackout that was put into effect over concerns the Japanese would bomb the West Coast. When the nurses finally arrived at Camp Stoneman, they were processed and ready to embark on their overseas mission. The nurses rode in a Pullman car attached to a series of troop trains, taking them 12 days to get to Camp Stoneman. While at Camp McCoy, she learned she would be shipped overseas but didn’t know the location of her duty station because it was confidential.įrom Camp McCoy, Coate and 11 other nurses boarded a train for Camp Stoneman, California, which the Army utilized as a staging area for troops headed to the Pacific Theater of Operations during World War II. When she joined the service, Coate received her orders to go to Camp McCoy in Sparta, Wisconsin, taking a train from Danville to get to the installation. She stayed at Lakeview Hospital until 1942 before going to work at the Soldiers Home. 20, 1919, in Union Corner, a small community in eastern Illinois near the Indiana border, Coate became a registered nurse in 1941 after earning her nursing degree at the Lakeview Hospital School of Nursing in Danville, Illinois. Army Nurse Corps on and would serve for over two years as a nurse in the South Pacific, advancing to the rank of first lieutenant.īorn Nov. “The chief nurse came to me and she said, ‘What are you young people doing here? You need to get into the war,’” said Coate, who resides in Leander, Texas.Ĭoate, age 23, joined the U.S. One day the chief nurse of the facility, who was a nurse in World War I, came up to Coate and a group of nurses and asked them a question. It was the spring of 1943 and Coate was working as a young nurse at the Soldiers Home, the Veterans Administration medical facility in Danville, Illinois. 20, Freda Haworth Coate recalled the time she was called upon to serve her country in World War II. Before she marked her 100th birthday Nov.
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